


Ashes to Ashes

by Archaeopteryx



Category: Big Hero 6 (2014)
Genre: Gen, Spoilers, Tadashi Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-09 22:43:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3267092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archaeopteryx/pseuds/Archaeopteryx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five days after the Showcase fire, Tadashi Hamada crawls from the wreckage, coughing and soot-streaked but otherwise unharmed, with no memory of the interim. His friends and family are bewildered but overjoyed, and it seems like everything will go back to normal.</p><p>Then he starts finding feathers on his pillow, and scales on his legs, and things get weird fast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ashes to Ashes

**Author's Note:**

> Act 1, Scene 1-3

The rain swept through the streets of San Fransokyo, pouring in waterfalls from gutters and awnings. It soaked the clothing of tourists and residents alike, making a churning mud pit of the ashes where days ago a building had burned to the ground.

The memorial on the college steps had been half cleared, half covered by an impromptu shield of umbrellas. The storm doused any lit candles. At the cemetery, the grass lay limp in ankle-deep mud that coated the suits of mourners to the calves no matter how they tried to keep to the gravel paths.

Hiro didn’t. Eir feet cramped in the too-small shoes, and ey hunched eir shoulders in the too-big suit. Ey didn’t want to be here anyway, and maybe if ey stood in the mud long enough it would swallow em completely.

The ceremony ended quickly, simple and without ornamentation. The rain trailed off as the mourners dispersed from the dead boy’s home back to their own, leaving a woman in a black dress she had hoped never to wear again, and a child in an ill-fitting suit with mud up to the knees.

“Hiro?” Aunt Cass called from the living room.

“No,” came the muffled reply.

Cass bit her lip, twisting her hands worriedly. “I — I’ll be down here if you want anything.”

Upstairs, Hiro rolled over, pulling a blanket over eir head.

It was hard to think of fire with the heavens opening overhead, but the afterimage of the explosion still burnt against eir retinas: inferno bursting from the windows of the building like the wings of a monstrous bird.

 

***

 

In the ashes, something stirred.

They flowed against the dripping water, gathering and piling of their own accord, twisting together into a lumpy approximation of a body — then crude limbs — then fingers, rough at first but gaining detail by the moment — then hair, and teeth, and a soft-lined face. The ashes smoothed, gaining color and vitality, pulling away from their substrate, and with a spasm and a sputtering gasp a young man collapsed coughing in the muddy soot.

“Whga — ?”

Tadashi Hamada struggled to breathe, choking on ash. The slick mud gave him no purchase when he tried to push himself up, and his body refused to orient itself properly. By chance a flailing hand struck something solid, and he dragged himself onto a broken slab of concrete, spluttering out the worst of the soot in his mouth and finally beginning to shiver. Rubbing his eyes did nothing to clear them, the coughing had lodged in his lungs, and even the mild breeze froze him to the bone.

“Wherr … ?”

Mud, twisted metal, and burnt concrete, for as far as he could see until he lifted his head. Blinking back grit and struggling to focus, he knew this skyline even despite the wreckage.

He wiped his mouth, breaking into another fit of sputtering and spitting as he swallowed yet more soot. His hands and feet had the worst of it, but the watery mud covered him head to foot — and nothing else, he realized belatedly, though right now modesty was the least of his concerns. The fire …

His breathing, already labored, grew fast and shallow. The creak and groan of infrastructure caving in swallowed him, the heat fierce on his skin even as he shivered. He curled up on his slab, trembling uncontrollably.

If he had died, there should be more pain involved.

The fire reminded him of warmth. He forced himself to uncurl, dragging himself to his knees, then to his feet. His legs shook so badly he could hardly stand, but it was a start. Warmth, first, and a shower, and clothes, and sleep, and sometime that wasn’t now he could try to process what had happened.

Whatever it was had left him seriously weak. He leaned on fragments of cinderblock wall and concrete as he staggered through the rubble, and lost count of the time he slipped and landed in the mud again. The silence made him nervous — shouldn’t there be firemen? Ambulances? The rain might have driven away observers, but not emergency responders.

Nothing fit together, and nothing made sense, and he would figure it out once he wasn’t skirting hypothermia.

A chain-link fence surrounded the ruined building. He almost cried, looking at it, but the thought of distant warmth made him keep moving. After a bit of searching, several more falls, and still more bruises, he found the gate, held shut by only a loose chain and a peg in the ground. His stiff, half-frozen fingers needed several tries to free the peg, but eventually he managed to push the gate open just wide enough to squeeze out.

There were still the streets of San Fransokyo to brave, but just being out of the wreckage made him feel a little more real.

He clung close to walls, partly for shelter and partly in the hopes that the occasional driver whose headlights swept over him wouldn’t notice that he wasn’t wearing anything but the ashes he’d woken up in. He didn’t pass anyone on the sidewalk, not with it already dark out, and he was beginning to think he might make it home safe before a van swerved to the side of the road and skidded to a stop beside him. He threw up an arm, heart in his mouth, blinded by the sudden glare of headlights, and thought, Oh no.

After a moment, the familiar dents and scratches in the olive green registered, right as the passenger’s seat door burst open and Wasabi — in a rumpled suit, for some reason — almost fell out with a breathless yell, “Please tell me you’re not a ghost because I just left a funeral and I think I might be hallucinating and I don’t think I can deal with this right now oh god this is so weird and I’m sorry.”

“Uh,” Tadashi said. In the space it took his frozen brain to catch up, Wasabi’s expression switched from half-panicked to baffled and a little unnerved.

“Hang on,” he said, and disappeared into the backseat. Tadashi could only stare until his friend reemerged and threw a sweater at him. It smacked into his chest; he grabbed it reflexively, hugging the wool close. “You’re — okay — you’re real. Unless this is worse than I thought. And I really shouldn’t be driving like this oh god — Tadashi?”

“Y-y-yeah,” he said, teeth chattering. His voice scratched at his throat, smoky and soot-coated like the rest of him. “W-what’s going on?”

Wasabi threw his hands up. “You tell me! You're dead!”

“I’m r-really c-c-cold,” Tadashi stammered, before the second part of the sentence sank in. “ … I what.”

“Well, put the sweater on, that’s what it’s for — you died. You’re dead. I just got back from your funeral!” There was a hysterical note in Wasabi’s voice, and in the dim glow of reflected headlights Tadashi could tell he was on the verge of tears. “And now you’re here and nothing makes sense and get in the damn car before you freeze and die! Again!”

“Um — I’m kind of — ” Tadashi gestured at himself, indicating the sooty mud.

“I don’t care!”

Tadashi didn’t need to be told again. He grabbed Wasabi’s hand when the larger boy offered it, accepting the help into the passenger’s seat eagerly; he wasn’t sure his legs would have let him otherwise. It took him a moment of puzzled staring to remember how sweaters worked, and a while to puppeteer his stiff muscles into getting it over his head. When he reemerged to find another fabric object in front of his face he could only blink at it.

“Pants,” Wasabi prompted him. Reflexive motor program took care of the rest. The sweatpants were absurdly oversized, meant to be loose on someone of Wasabi’s measurements, but they improved greatly on nothing at all. Still damp and freezing, he curled up and tucked his legs into the sweater, hugging his knees with a shivering breath.

“So cold,” he mumbled. “Tired … ”

“Oh no. Oh hell no. C’mere — ” The van’s aging heating unit cranked up to full blast with a complainant rattle as Wasabi pulled him over. “Nobody’s going hypothermic on my watch. Tadashi?”

“’s me.” His tongue slurred around the words; Wasabi was warm, and he really wanted to sleep.

“Oh my god, what is happening.” Wasabi’s hand ran through his hair, spiked at angles wilder than Hiro’s by ash and mud, and settled briefly under Tadashi’s chin, feeling for and finding a pulse. “Oh god. Oh god. Oh, god.”

“Dunno.” Twitching one shoulder was about as much as he could manage. The thaw made his shivering about three times worse. “ … Hiro? Is Hiro okay?”

Wasabi’s silence shot a bolt of fear through his stomach, and the eventual answer helped nothing. “Well … ”

Tadashi shoved off Wasabi’s shoulder, squirming out of his friend’s arms as his heartrate sped up. “What happened? Is ey hurt? Did ey do something stupid?” It would be just like his little sibling to self-destruct. What if ey’d gone and pissed off Yama again? He’d kill Hiro if that happened. He would die — again? — find Hiro in the afterlife, and kill em. “What happened?”

“Tadashi, Tadashi — ” Wasabi held up his hands. His voice cut through the growing panic, and Tadashi fell silent, chest heaving. “Ey’s fine! Just … not really okay.”

He fell back against the seat, shaking half from cold and half from distress, rubbing his eyes and hissing a curse as he inadvertently rubbed more grit into them. "God. I'm so sorry … "

"Hey," said Wasabi, reaching out to rub his shoulder. "Running into that fire was stupid, but it was a you kind of stupid. Hiro gets it, I think. Ey'll be okay. Especially since you're not, uh, actually dead."

Tadashi glanced at him sidelong. "You're taking this better."

"I've accepted that this situation is bizarre but actually happening. Kinda numb to it right now. I’ll freak out once it sinks in.” Wasabi shrugged. "Lucky Cat, yeah?"

"Yeah." Tadashi had no idea how he would face Aunt Cass, let alone his little sibling, but home sounded just about like heaven right now. "Y-yeah."

Something occurred to him as Wasabi put the van in gear and prepared to pull out of the impromptu parking spot. 

"The professor — Professor Callaghan, is he — ?”

Wasabi stopped, and the look on his face said everything, even before he shook his head. “I’m so sorry. He’s dead.”

The van pulled out into the street, its wheels rippling through a puddle by the curb. Tadashi folded over and buried his face in his hands. He could feel Wasabi’s worried glances, but couldn’t bring himself to look up. He’d just crawled out of his own ashes, the cold still clung to his bones and lungs, and the mentor he’d almost been killed trying to save had died anyway. He was allowed to not be okay.

“H-how long?” he rasped, when he could bring himself to ask.

“Five — ” Wasabi swallowed. “Five days.” 

The number punched Tadashi in the gut, again. Five days of his friends and family thinking he was dead? Five days and a funeral? Aunt Cass would kill him. Unless Hiro got there first. It would be a contest.

“Callaghan … I tried to … "

“Yeah. Hiro said.” Watching the road gave Wasabi a good reason not to look at him. “That's about all ey would say. To anyone.” Tadashi winced. “Of course you got yourself killed running into a burning building! Of course you did! It was a stupid knuckleheaded self-sacrificing hero-complex stunt and of course that's how you died! How else!” Wasabi glanced over as they pulled up to a red light, and amended, “ … almost died. Sorry. Just got back from your funeral. It's been a rough week. I still kinda feel like I'm talking to a ghost."

"Light's green," said Tadashi meekly.

Wasabi startled, snapping back to the road just as an impatient driver honked. Tadashi stayed tactfully quiet, and tried not to smear ash all over the passenger’s seat.


End file.
